A lonely journey ... a grieving woman in silhouette. Photograph: Robert Matton/Alamy

One of the remarkable gifts of reading is that it allows us to inhabit other people's emotions without actually experiencing them ourselves. And the strange, or not so strange, thing is that when we are in the grips of our own strong emotions – love or grief – we especially like to read about them.

I found that while I was in the midst of the painful grieving for my brother, Martin, it was a comfort to read about other people in similar pain. Grief makes us feel alone, but being privy to other's suffering gives us company on the hard and difficult journey following a loved one's death.

In my list, I have included books that speak to multiple types of grief, not just the grief that is experienced when losing a loved one, since even without facing a death, we are often grieving – for an absent love, or a place, or a lost part of our own lives.

I have also included a piece of music in the list because my brother was a musician, a classical pianist. Music was the focus of his life, and I took great comfort from listening to the music he loved during the most intense period of my grief.

This novel tells the story of the adult Bundren children, on their way, by horse and cart, to bury their mother, Addie, in Jefferson, a town 40 miles away from where she has died. The family travel with the body of their mother in a coffin built by the carpenter son, Cash, and each of the children narrates a part of the journey. It is a beautiful and lyrical look at grief, told by a chorus of mourners.

This lament for the betrayal that often accompanies romantic love – in this case the narrator is part of a triangle that involves a married couple – is the heart laid bare, in all its rawness and power. The prose of the book, much of it resembling poetry, is driven forward by the depth of the narrator's feeling for the man she has loved and lost. Every word is high octane emotion.

3. Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert

A collection of poetry, written near the end of Jack Gilbert's life, which addresses mortality as one of its major themes, in particular the death of Gilbert's wife, Michiko Nogami. The poems are beautiful, never sentimental, and do what good poems can do – give us another way to see what we think we know, as in these lines about Icarus from the poem about a marriage ending called "Failing and Flying."

"I believe Icraus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph."

Originally an 8th-century Irish ballad narrated by a young servant who has been abandoned by her lover and left to turn over his empty promises. The language of grief is so fresh and raw that the lyric could have been written a week ago, and the translation by Lady Gregory keeps all of the music in the lines. With each re-reading it is newly heartbreaking to hear words such as these:

"It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;"

5. Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Commissioned by Count Walsegg to memorialise the death of his wife, and unfinished at Mozart's own death in 1791, the Requiem was largely completed by a fellow composer, Franz Sussmayr. It is a stunning musical achievement and gives full voice to grief and the grieving process with some of the most powerful and beautiful musical phrases ever composed.

This novel, set in a Memmonite community in rural Manitoba, is the story of Nomi Nickel, a 16-year-old girl who is mourning the loss of her mother and sister, both of whom have left the religious community for the freedom of the larger world, leaving Nomi and her father behind to cope with the wreckage of their family. All of Toews' novels are essentially about grief, and all of them are also very funny. A Complicated Kindness looks at loss through humour, the loss no less tragic for the fact that we can laugh at it.

This classic text of grief is still one of the best books on the subject, even though it is viewed through the lens of religious feeling in an increasingly secular world. The book was written from the four journals that Lewis kept while dealing with the loss of his wife to cancer after only three years of marriage. This is a ground level study of grief, and the observations that Lewis makes in response to his wife's death are moving and profound.

Hemingway wrote this memoir at the end of his life to address the writer and man he was at the beginning of his life. It details his years in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and it is an account of a man grieving for the happiness that accompanied those early years. The grief, in old age, for one's youth, comes to us all in some form, and no one expresses this grief so beautifully and poignantly as Hemingway does in this little book.

9. A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir

When someone is dying of cancer there is a kind of pre-grief that happens while the dying person becomes less themselves through the changes to their physical body brought on by the cancer. This short memoir is a powerful account of De Beauvoir's mother's last days, written in brutally honest prose that spares the reader nothing of the horrors of an individual life coming to a close.

Published when Shelley was barely into her twenties, this story of a monster who cannot be controlled by his maker has grief at its heart. There is the grief felt by Victor Frankenstein for creating such a brutal creature, one which murders his own brother; and the raw grief of the monster who cannot find love or acceptance, and whose very nature betrays him and condemns him to a life of lonely isolation.